The Descendants (2011)

We Bought a Zoo and The Descendants, two films about a father having to come to terms with the loss of his wife and reconnect with his children. Whilst Matt Damon's character moved to the countryside, bought a zoo and met Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney doesn't have such an easy time of things.

Lawyer and property owner Matt King (George Clooney) is told that his wife Elizabeth, in a coma after a boating accident, will never wake up and has a living will requesting that her care be withdrawn. Ahead of her life support machine being turned off, Matt must reconnect with his daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), and inform friends and family that she is about to die so they can pay their last respects. In the process, he finds out that Elizabeth had been having an affair and was planning on leaving him. If that weren't enough, he has to juggle the selling of his family's land to a real estate developer.

After churning out four films in eight years, director Alexander Payne took seven years to get around to number five. Was it worth the wait? He's certainly had long enough to work on it and I loved Sideways so he had quite a lot to live up to. The numerous awards it won, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globes for Best Film and Best Actor, meant that my hopes were high. Fortunately, it met them. Well, sort of. I mean, it's a very good film: funny, moving, well written and very well acted but it's just lacking something. It doesn't feel like one of the ten best films of the year, as so many critics named it. More than anything, it feels too linear. The story unfolds but it does so in a straight line, never really deviating from its inexorable march towards the ending that simply happens. The only surprise is that there aren't any. Matt finds out his wife was cheating on him, so he goes looking for the man (Matthew Lillard). We all know he's going to confront the man eventually, so when it happens, no matter how good the scene is (and it is), it's lacking any kind of punch. Even the negotiations over the sale of his land result in a predictable conclusion.

It might not venture far off the beaten track but at least it does it well. Matt's attempts to reconnect with his daughters, with whom he had a distant relationship, provide easily the best scenes in the film. Other highlights include the very realistic way the film deals with the impending death of a loved one; the seemingly endless parade of cousins Matt has to endure, among them Cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges); and the often hilariously non-sequitur Sid (Nick Krause). There isn't any scene or any character that doesn't really work and it's just a pity that the whole thing comes off as lacking any sense of direction or a meaningful message other than "stuff happens".

Straightforward? Yes, but it's still a very, very good film. George Clooney and Shailene Woodley in particular are superb, it's deftly made and Alexander Payne strikes a nice balance between heartfelt and funny.

8 out of 10.

We Bought a Zoo (2011)

After watching Battleship, I remarked to a friend that "I should have watched We Bought a Zoo instead". She replied, "so why don't you watch it now?" So I did.

Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) is a recently widowed single parent with two children: teenage son Dylan (Colin Ford) and younger daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Unhappy, with everything in the city reminding him of his late wife and Dylan expelled from school after he acts out, Benjamin quits his job, rebuffs the advances of the attractive single moms at his kids' school and tells his brother Duncan (Thomas Haden Church) that he's moving into the countryside. He and Rosie find the perfect place, their dream home. There's just one problem: it's a zoo. The place badly needs owners who care and have the time, money and effort to bring the place up to scratch in time for its next inspection. If it fails, the animals will be sent elsewhere and the zookeepers will lose their jobs. Fortunately, this is Hollywood so the issue of money is brushed over as Benjamin conveniently finds that his wife left him thousands of dollars. He cashes the cheque and everyone gets to work. In struggling to turn the place around in time, Ben finds himself falling for beautiful zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) and Kelly's younger cousin Lily (Elle Fanning) flirts with the seemingly oblivious Dylan. As the family work to save the zoo's future, they examine their relationships with each other and how the loss of their mother has affected them.

If only every widower could quit his job, drop everything, buy a dream house in the sunny California countryside and spend his days quietly tending to a small zoo with Scarlett Johansson for company. It's a lovely fantasy and it could have made for a silly, hokey film but thanks to a combination of a good screenplay and warm, genuine performances, it works. Matt Damon's convincing and sympathetic as the grieving widower and Scarlett Johansson is very good, both witty and compassionate with an underlying steely determination. The child actors are uniformly good and I loved J. B. Smoove's cameo as the estate agent, although it was a bit strange to see him playing someone other than Leon from Curb. As for the inevitable life lessons about love, loss and so on that the family must go through, they're not preachy and they weren't so sickly sweet that they made me roll my eyes.

Sure, it's not groundbreaking and the ending's not exactly a surprise but it's a good, honest piece of family entertainment. It's funny, well acted and just darn enjoyable. How anyone could possibly dislike this film is utterly beyond me. Oh, and it's a damn sight better than Battleship.

7 out of 10.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)

At the preview screening for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, I was handed a free copy of the novel the film is based on, which I immediately decided I would give to my mother. That should tell you all you need to know about the target audience.

Ewan McGregor plays Dr. Fred Jones, a fisheries expert for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. One morning he receives a nicely-worded email from Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). She works for a consultancy firm that represents Sheikh Muhammad (Amr Waked), an eccentric Yemeni businessman who dreams of bringing salmon to the deserts of Yemen. Dr. Jones replies that such a project would be "fundamentally unfeasible", repeating as such to his wife Mary (Rachael Stirling) and his boss Bernard (Conleth Hill a.k.a. Varys from Game of Thrones). When a terrorist attack at a mosque in Afghanistan threatens to bring another round of bad news for the government, the Prime Minister's press secretary, the highly strung Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), decides that they need some good news from the Middle East for a change. Drawing blanks, she eventually discovers the Sheikh's salmon fishing proposal and orders Bernard to proceed at full steam. Dr. Jones is ordered to meet Harriet. He does and again rubbishes the plan. Bernard, acting on orders from on high, gives Dr. Jones an ultimatum: be seconded to Harriet's firm and work on the salmon plan or be sacked. His marriage strained and his wife working in Switzerland, he reluctantly accepts.

Harriet, meanwhile, is in a relationship with Captain Robert Mayers (Tom Misom), who is stationed in Afghanistan. Dr. Jones arrives on secondment and she manages to convince him that the Sheikh's vast wealth and the presence of a dam means that the project is "plausible". They meet the Sheikh and Dr. Jones is slowly convinced that he and the project aren't quite as crazy as he first thought. Things almost fall apart when Captain Mayers is reported missing in action but the two go to Yemen to oversee the final stages of the project. Just before he leaves, his wife returns from Switzerland and confronts him about his relationship with Harriet. He admits that he's falling in love with her and they separate. In Yemen, the project initially seems to be a success before it is sabotaged by terrorists and fails. Captain Mayers, recently rescued from Afghanistan, makes a dramatic reappearance just as Dr. Jones declares his love for Harriet and she has to decide who she wants to be with as he must decide whether he wants to stay in Yemen and see the project to completion or return home to Britain.

Not only had I never read the novel of the same name, I had no idea that it wasn't written in prose but as a collection of interviews, official documents, diary entries and emails. While the narrative structure of the novel is quite interesting, the same cannot be said for the film. It's typical rom-com nonsense: utterly predictable and about as strenuous as lifting a spoonful of ice cream from the bowl to your mouth. McGregor and Blunt are pleasant and have a nice chemistry between them but they're never believable as lovers as their off-screen friendship seeps through. The "culture clash" between the two of them is suitably summed up by their names: Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and Fred Jones. Unfortunately, that's as subtle as the film gets, resorting to crude metaphors to convey messages about love and faith. Really, the only bright spot is Kristin Scott Thomas' brilliantly acerbic press secretary, from whom almost all of the laughs come.

Ridiculous, fluffy, sugary, silly, predictable nonsense. The cast at least look like they had a good time making it and if this is your sort of thing, you'll spend an enjoyable hour and forty-seven minutes watching a film about bringing fish to a desert.

5 out of 10.

Is Anybody There? (2008)

Bill Milner has quite a career ahead of him. Nominated for four young performer or newcomer of the year awards for Son of Rambow, Is Anybody There? and Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and playing Young Magneto in X-Men: First Class, the sixteen-year-old already has an impressive body of work to his name. In Is Anybody There? Milner stars alongside some fantastic actors: Sir Michael Caine, David Morrissey, Anne-Marie Duff, Leslie Phillips, Sylvia Syms, Peter Vaughan, Thelma Barlow, Rosemary Harris and the late Elizabeth Spriggs.

Milner plays Edward, a lonely young boy whose parents (David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff) have turned their house into a struggling old people's home. Confronted by death and in the presence of the slowly dying, Edward has become fascinated in the paranormal and he keeps a diary of "paranormal happenings", in which he sadly makes daily entries of "no recorded evadense". When a resident dies, Edward recovers his recording equipment from the old man's room so he can listen to his last breaths and try and hear his ghost leaving his body, a practice his father later remarks is "how the Yorkshire Ripper must have started". Edward's morbid fascination with the recently departed is not driven by a desire to kill things but by a need, a desperate need, to know what happens after you die. It is the new resident, retired magician Clarence (Michael Caine), who clashes with Edward over this.

Ordered by the council to move into the home, widower Clarence is deeply unhappy and he and Edward clash immediately. When Edward saves Clarence's life after he tries to kill himself, the two make up. After Edward takes it upon himself to confiscate Clarence's belts, stand watch underneath his window and give him some helpful leaflets (including "Coping with bereavement" and "Information on cervical smears"), the two, helped along by their mutual disdain for the house, become closer. To satiate Edward's desire for contact with the dead, Clarence arranges a seemingly successful seance in the basement, leading Edward to happily write "A MANAFESTATION!" in his diary.

When the two take a trip to an old storage room Clarence owns to pick up some of his old equipment for a performance for Edward's birthday, Clarence gets confused and gets into a minor collision with another vehicle. As the two push the campervan back to the house, Clarence starts to get irritated with Edward's repeated talk of the afterlife. When Clarence says he'd come back as a badger because being a person is a pain in the arse, Edward asks him to come back and see him if he dies, prompting Clarence to tell him, "You don't come back, son! Once they've gone, you can't talk to them!" and laments that he was never able to tell his wife he was sorry before she died, revealing that she divorced him because of his infidelity and confessing that he even missed her funeral. Edward storms off but at his birthday party, the two reconcile and Clarence performs his show, which goes well until he gets confused again and accidentally severs a fellow resident's finger. After his father questions his friendship with Clarence, Edward shouts that he wishes Clarence was his father and plays a recording of his father making sexual advances towards their young helper, Tanya (Linzey Cocker), prompting his parents to separate. After the two take a trip to the graveyard where his ex-wife is buried, the rapidity with which Clarence's dementia is overcoming him becomes clear.

The ending is quite predictable and overall the film does feel like it's going through the motions, but two great performances from Cain and Milner really lift the proceedings. It's a pity that the likes of Leslie Philips and Rosemary Harris are underused, being often little more than background characters, but they are most welcome. Morrissey and Duff are very good as Edward's parents and the film is directed capably by John Crowley, full of touching moments like the scene where Clarence speaks his ex-wife's name into the mirror as the camera focuses one by one on old pictures of the two. Is Anybody There? might not be the most original or ground-breaking drama, but it does what it sets out to do and if you don't raise your expectations too high, you'll have an enjoyable ninety-four minutes.

7 out of 10.

The Iron Lady (2011)

"OK, I've got to thank everybody in England that let me come and... trample all over their history." - Meryl Streep, when accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama.

For a biopic about one of the most partisan and controversial politicians in British history, The Iron Lady is strangely... apolitical. I'm not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. I don't think she's the devil incarnate or the worst Prime Minister in history and I do accept that she did some good, but the overwhelming majority of the decisions she took were terrible ones that ruined lives. Of course, you might not hold that view. You might think she's the best Prime Minister since Churchill (as she is referred to during the film), but if you come into this film expecting to see her decisions and thought-making process really scrutinised, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film that details the reasons for the polarised opinions of her premiership, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film of any real substance, you'll leave disappointed. In trying not to annoy anyone, writer Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd have made a film that will annoy everyone.

For the first half-hour or forty minutes, the film almost never leaves Thatcher's house. The 84-year-old former Prime Minister is shown buying a pint of milk and a paper from the corner shop and taking them back home to eat breakfast with her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), whom she chastises for putting too much butter on his toast and complains to about the price of milk. Thatcher's assistant walks in and Denis vanishes just as she tells an empty chair to eat its egg. Her husband is dead and she is hallucinating. The film is set in 2009, shortly before the unveiling of her official portrait in 10 Downing Street and portrays a sad, lonely woman struggling to cope with the loss of her husband and the oncoming dementia.

Streep is magnificent, absolutely brilliant and utterly convincing as Thatcher, both as the ambitious and power-hungry young woman and as the frail and lonely old woman (the even younger Thatcher played by young actress Alexandra Roach). She effortlessly conveys Thatcher's hubris and hunger for power and easily evokes sympathy for the confused old woman pining for her beloved husband and desperate to see her son Mark, now living half a world away in South Africa. It's such a pity that the rest of the film can't live up to Streep's performance. Thatcher is trapped inside her house and the film is trapped inside the confines of Morgan and Lloyd's limited ambitions.

When we finally leave Thatcher's house, we're taken along a frustratingly erratic and brief look at her political career - from her beginnings as a grocer's daughter inspired by her father's passionate oratory, to a stuffy dinner with local Conservatives looking for a prospective candidate, to Denis' proposal and a holiday with her children Carol and Mark to her first day in the House of Commons, a dispatch-box clash with the Labour Shadow Minister, her decision to run for the leadership of her party, clashes with Ministers over the budget, the Brighton Bombing, her decision to go to war over the Falkland Islands and the decisions that cost her her colleagues' support - the poll tax and the European Union - to her final day in office.

The glimpses of the past are brief and do nothing more than tell us what happened. For example, Thatcher and her then-Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Stewart Head) are confronted by Michael Heseltine (Richard E. Grant) and other Cabinet members over their newly-leaked budget. The "wets" are concerned that she is cutting public spending too quickly and urge her and Howe to slow their plans. Thatcher replies, "Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it." What medicine? Why does the patient require it? Why was the response to her policies so visceral? These questions, and many more, are never answered, or even asked. Her decision to close hundreds of mines is all but glossed over: she says they must be closed, and we see stock footage of the Miners' Strike and then protesters attack her car. In a way it's an appropriate metaphor for her Premiership: barrelling along and sweeping aside ordinary people as she goes inexorably onwards. The tens of thousands of people who were put out of a job by the pit closures go unmentioned, as does the devastation on local communities. What of her mass privatisation of nationalised industries? Barely mentioned. Former Conservative Prime Minister and then-elder statesman Harold Macmillan derided Thatcher for "selling off the family silver" but apparently we needed more scenes of her imagining her dead husband so that never gets a mention. Neither does her legacy of greed, deregulation and neo-liberalism that would cause a massive financial crisis 25 years later.

The mass unemployment, the gap between rich and poor growing inexorably, the devastating blows struck against British industry that are still being felt to this very day, her savage deflationary policies that cost real people their lives and livelihoods are all cast aside. When one Minister questions the fairness of the Poll Tax, she gives him a lecture on social responsibility and tells him to shut up. It is that, and her bullying and humiliation of her closest ally, Howe, which leads to her downfall. The film implies that but for her colleagues' cowardice, she could have pressed on with the Poll Tax, which was apparently as necessary as the "medicine" she gave to the economy at the start of her Premiership. Brief clips from the Poll Tax Riots are shown, but again, the underlying reasons are completely ignored. It's incredibly frustrating.

As the film draws to a close, Thatcher packs up her dead husband's clothes and banishes the memory of him. As he walks away, she calls after the hallucination, tears streaming down her cheeks. It's a touching moment, but by this point the scenes between her and Denis had been so over-done that they'd lost almost all their impact. Then, the film ends. It's a truly unsatisfying ending to a wasteful and pointless film.

Watch The Iron Lady for another tour de force from Meryl Streep. Once again, she does not play the character, she lives the character, but that's all it really is: a hollow film supported entirely by Streep. Take her performance away and you'd have nothing more than a second-rate biopic that goes through the motions, piles on the fanciful imaginings of an elderly widow, throws you some flashbacks and some facts and says "make up your own mind".

6 out of 10.

Adventureland (2009)

This is the only film I've seen at the cinema where I've come in late and missed the first few minutes. I was going to see it with a friend and were delayed getting there and missed the first three or four minutes. Annoyed, I swore I would never do the same thing again, and so far I have not. Four years later, I finally got around to watching it again, from the start, uninterrupted! Here's the review.

Adventureland is a romantic comedy set in 1980s Pennsylvania. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) desperately wants to join his best friend on holiday in Europe before they set off for university together. Unfortunately, his dad's demotion means his parents can't afford to pay for the trip and faced with no other option, he gets a job at Adventureland, the local lame amusement park. There, he encounters an eclectic range of characters: pipe-smoking Joel (Martin Starr), his ex-best friend Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush), smooth-talking repairman Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the enticing Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), eccentric assistant manager Bobby (Bill Hader) and his wife, manager Paulette (Kristen Wiig) and the beautiful, enchanting Em (Kristen Stewart).

After Em saves James from being stabbed by an understandably irate customer, he falls for her and the two begin a very awkward, stop-start relationship, punctuated by uncomfortable encounters with her father (Josh Pais) and stepmother (the excellent Mary Birdsong), Em's relationship with the unhappily married Mike and Lisa P.'s suspicious interest in James.

Adventureland's strengths are in its performances. It's not the funniest comedy I've ever seen. In fact, I didn't laugh out loud more than two or three times, but Eisenberg is his usual winning self, Stewart is confident in her role, self-assured and at the same time vulnerable and the various supporting characters are well-played. If you're only familiar with Kristen Stewart through her Twilight roles (I'm not, having only seen the first one quite a while ago), you probably already have an opinion of her. If it's a negative one, put that to one side and watch her in this film. If you think she can't act, that she only has "one facial expression" or if you hold any of the other criticisms that have been levelled at her, watch this film. It's also an excellent retro piece, full of classic 80s music (notably Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus", which is played ad nauseum on the theme park's speakers and always reminds me of the excellent "Dr. Zaius" parody in The Simpsons) and various news clips of President Reagan.

The film's ending split my friend and I. He disliked it, saying it was too predictable. I disagreed, saying that their relationship ended appropriately. Either way, if you're looking for a good, well-acted film and nostalgic for either young love or the 1980s, watch Adventureland.

8 out of 10.